American dream
Eugene Kaspersky, the CEO of the Russian cybersecurity software firm that bears his name, had a big American dream. He wanted his company to go beyond selling anti-virus software to consumers and small businesses and become a major vendor to the US government — one of the world’s biggest buyers of cybersecurity tools.
Kaspersky set up a US subsidiary, KGSS, in Arlington, Virginia that would be focused on winning that business. He sponsored flashy conferences with high-profile speakers — including Michael Flynn, who was briefly President Donald Trump’s national security adviser — sought to join US trade groups and even underwrote programming on National Public Radio.
All of this was done to burnish Kaspersky’s image and help it become an accepted vendor for the US government despite its Russian roots, according to people familiar with the strategy.
But Eugene Kaspersky was never able to overcome lingering suspicions among US intelligence officials that he and his company were, or could become, pawns of Russia’s spy agencies. Kaspersky “has never helped, nor will help, any government in the world with its cyber espionage efforts,” the company said.
Kaspersky’s American ambitions were further eroded by the sharp deterioration in US-Russia relations following Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, and later when US intelligence agencies concluded that Russia had hacked the 2016 US presidential election.
Testifying before the US Congress in May, US intelligence chiefs for the first time publicly expressed doubt that Kaspersky products could be trusted.
FBI agents last month interviewed Kaspersky employees, asking whether they reported to Russia-based executives and how much data from American customers could be seen by Russian employees, according to three current and former employees. The FBI declined to comment on Thursday.
On last Tuesday, the US General Services Administration, the government agency that manages the federal bureaucracy, removed Kaspersky from a list of approved vendors, saying GSA’s mission was to ensure the security of US government systems.
There is also a bill before Congress that would explicitly bar the Defence Department from using any Kaspersky products.
Kaspersky says his company being targeted for political reasons.
“These reckless actions negatively impact global cybersecurity by limiting competition, slowing down technology innovations and ruining the industry and law enforcement agency cooperation required to catch the bad guys,” he said in a statement to Reuters.
The Arlington offices of KGSS were empty when a Reuters reporter visited them on last Thursday. A Kaspersky spokeswoman said most of the staff, which number less than 10, often work from home.
The US clampdown comes even though officials have offered no public evidence to suggest the company has done anything untoward or that the Russian government is using its software to launch cyber attacks.
Two former employees and a person briefed on the FBI case said that Kaspersky software has at times inappropriately inspected and removed files from users’ machines in its hunt for alleged cyber criminals, even when those files were not corrupted by viruses.
“Kaspersky Lab believes it is completely unacceptable that the company is being unjustly accused without any hard evidence to back up these false allegations,” the Kaspersky spokeswoman said in response in an email. is
UNUSUAL STEP It is extremely rare for a company to be singled out for federal buying restrictions in the absence of clear evidence of wrongdoing.
“This sets a really dangerous precedent” where other nations could make similar, unsubstantiated claims against US vendors, said Robert M Lee, a former cyberwarfare operative for US intelligence and now CEO of cybersecurity start-up Dragos.
The Russian government has denounced the Kaspersky crackdown and said it does not rule out retaliatory measures. Officials at US tech companies with significant operations in Russia say they fear they could become targets.
Federal contracting databases reviewed by Reuters show only a few hundred thousand dollars in purchases from Kaspersky, and an employee confirmed the company’s federal government revenue was “miniscule.”
But Kaspersky also sells to federal contractors and third-party software companies that incorporate its technology in their products, so its technology may be more widely used in government than it appears from the contracting databases, US officials say.
Founded in 1997, Kaspersky grew rapidly through the 2000s to become one of the world’s leading anti-virus software companies.
But the company was dogged from the start by suspicions about its ties to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the main successor to the KGB. Eugene Kaspersky attended a KGB school and the company has acknowledged doing work for the FSB.
As the company grew, Kaspersky was determined to overcome those fears.
“We have to be more American than Americans,” Kaspersky said in 2013, when a US goodwill offensive began. “PUBLIC SHAMING” A cornerstone of the effort was a series of KGSS-hosted conferences